Jaywalking Was Invented, and It Changed Who the Street Belonged To

TL;DR: Crossing the street wherever you wanted used to be normal. Streets were where kids played, where vendors worked, and where everybody walked. When cars arrived and started killing people, the public blamed the cars. The auto industry responded with a campaign to move the blame onto people on foot, and part of that campaign was popularizing the word jaywalking, from 1920s slang for a clueless country person. Los Angeles passed the first widely copied law in 1925, written with the auto lobby's help. It worked so well that most of us cannot picture a street belonging to anyone but cars. This matters medically because street design is one of the strongest levers on whether people move, and Philadelphia has the proof: put speed cameras on Roosevelt Boulevard and pedestrian crashes drop by half.

Ask most people why children do not play in the street anymore and you will get an answer about parenting, or screens, or the world being more dangerous.

The more useful answer is that we gave the street away, on purpose, in a specific decade, after an organized campaign. It is one of the clearest cases in American life of a health outcome being produced by design rather than by choice, and the design is still there.

Who owned the street before cars?

Everyone, and not in a romantic sense. In the American city of the 1900s and 1910s the street was working space. Pedestrians crossed wherever they liked. Children played there because it was the open ground available in dense neighborhoods. Vendors sold from it, streetcars ran through it, and horse traffic moved slowly enough that all of this coexisted.

When automobiles arrived in numbers, they killed people at a rate that shocked the public, and a large share of the dead were children.

The reaction was not what a modern reader expects. Cities held public memorials for children killed by cars. Newspapers ran editorials against speeding drivers. Monuments went up. The public understanding was that cars were the intruder and the driver was at fault, and there was serious pressure for laws that would limit what cars could do in cities, including proposals for mechanical speed governors.

The car industry was looking at a future in which the automobile was permanently unwelcome in the American city.

How did jaywalking get invented?

Peter Norton, a historian at the University of Virginia, documented this in Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. The industry coalition, which called itself motordom, mounted a campaign to move responsibility from the vehicle to the person on foot.

The tools were ordinary public relations, and they were effective.

They took a word and weaponized it. "Jay" was period slang for a rube, a hick, somebody from the country who did not know how a city worked. Attaching it to people crossing mid-block turned a normal act into a class insult. Nobody who considered themselves a modern urbanite wanted to be a jay.

They made it look ridiculous. Safety campaigns hired actors to cross streets in outdated nineteenth-century clothing, or dressed as clowns, so that walking where you pleased read as backward and foolish rather than as ordinary.

They wrote the laws. Los Angeles enacted the first widely successful criminalization of jaywalking in 1925, using model legislation the auto lobby helped draft, and other American cities copied it.

Within about a decade, the default assumption flipped. The street belonged to cars, and a person on foot was a trespasser who had failed to use the designated place.

That reframing is the part that lasted. Most of us now find it difficult to imagine an arrangement where a road is not primarily for driving, which is itself a measure of how well the campaign worked.

Why does a doctor care about this?

Because the built environment is one of the strongest determinants of whether people are physically active, and physical activity is one of the strongest determinants of how long and how well people live.

When the street stopped being shared space, several things followed. Walking and cycling became activities requiring a decision, a route, and a tolerance for risk, rather than the default way of moving through a day. Children lost independent mobility, which is the ability to get somewhere on their own without an adult driving them. Outdoor play contracted toward scheduled, supervised, driven-to settings.

This is why "get more exercise" is such weak advice on its own. Telling somebody to walk more, in a place designed to make walking unpleasant and occasionally lethal, puts the entire burden on willpower and none of it on the thing producing the outcome. People in walkable places walk more, and they do it without deciding to.

What does Philadelphia's own data show?

This is where the argument stops being philosophical.

Roosevelt Boulevard is one of the most dangerous roads in the country. It runs as many as twelve lanes across its inner and outer drives, carries high speeds through dense neighborhoods, and has accounted for roughly 14% of the city's fatal crashes. Crossing it on foot is a genuine hazard, and the burden has fallen disproportionately on Black and brown neighborhoods.

Nobody fixed that by teaching pedestrians to be more careful.

Automated speed enforcement cameras went up on the Boulevard in 2020. Speeding violations fell by more than 95%. Pedestrian crashes fell by about half. The reporting on the program has described it as saving roughly a life a month.

Read that as a clinical result, because it is one. A single environmental change, requiring nothing from any individual, produced a mortality benefit that most medications would envy. The intervention was not education. It was design plus enforcement, aimed at speed, which is the variable that decides whether a person struck by a car survives.

The rest of the picture is honest about the limits. Philadelphia's Vision Zero reporting shows deaths among people walking still running well above the 2015 to 2019 average, and Broad Street has since overtaken Roosevelt Boulevard as the city's deadliest road. Fixing one corridor moves the problem rather than ending it. What it also does is demonstrate that the problem is tractable.

So what do you do with this?

Not much, alone, and that is the point of naming it. Most of what determines whether your neighborhood is walkable was decided by people you will never meet, some of them a century ago.

What it should change is how you think about your own behavior. If you have been treating your activity level as a personal failing, some meaningful share of it is a design problem you happen to be standing inside. That reframing is worth having, because self-blame is a poor motivator and an accurate picture is a better starting place than a guilty one.

And some of it is inside your control. Where you choose to live, if you have that choice, is one of the highest-leverage health decisions available and almost nobody evaluates it that way. Walkability is a health variable in the same sense that blood pressure is.

Guidance from the Clinic

"When someone tells me they cannot seem to be active, my first question now is about their block. Not their motivation. Where do you walk to, what is between you and there, and does it feel safe at seven in the evening. A lot of people have been carrying this as a character problem for years, and it turns out they live somewhere that makes the healthy choice cost forty minutes and a small amount of risk. That is worth naming out loud, because the plan changes once you see it. Sometimes the answer is finding the one route that works instead of trying harder on the route that does not. And when a patient tells me their kid does not go outside, I think about the fact that we made a decision about who streets are for, and we made it before any of us were born."

Related at Fishtown Medicine

• Philadelphia Walkability and Health - the local version of the movement question
• Philadelphia Environmental Health - the other ways the city shapes your biology
• Philadelphia Invented the American Drugstore - another case of a health outcome being manufactured
• A Mouthwash Invented a Disease - the marketing playbook in a different arena
• Philly Fitness Guide - where to move once you know where you can walk

Scientific References

1. Norton PD. Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. MIT Press; 2008. The foundational scholarly account of the 1920s campaign.
2. Norton PD. "Street Rivals: Jaywalking and the Invention of the Motor Age Street." Technology and Culture. 2007;48(2):331-359.
3. JSTOR Daily. "'Jay Walking' and the Fight for the Streets."
4. PhillyVoice. "As speed cameras help cut fatalities on Roosevelt Boulevard, Broad Street becomes Philly's deadliest road." Philadelphia Vision Zero 2024 annual report coverage.
5. WHYY. "Philly's Vision Zero report shows progress and setbacks in road safety."
6. Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia. "Roosevelt Boulevard Still a Death Trap."
7. The Philadelphia Tribune. "Philly's riskiest, deadliest roads in Black and Brown neighborhoods."